I have a question regarding UTXO management and coin joins. I recently tested Wasabi wallet with ~$20 and got 4 outputs after mixxing. If I send the UTXOs back to an address to consolidate after mixxing, can't it be heuristically verified that the sats probably ended up with me again? What is the best practice between coinjoins and consolidation? I hope the question is phrased somewhat understandably.
Discussion
With such a low amount, even that is difficult to analyze because a lot of people have the same or more money.
If you do the same with 20 bitcoin then it's a worse situation.
Wasabi is best used as a wallet, so that you frequently receive coins, and frequently send out small percentages of your total wallet balance, with coinjoin inbetween.
If you enter a coinjoin round with only a single (nonprivate) input, you should avoid consolidating all outputs from that round in a single transaction. A "Safety coinjoin" will automatically begin under this scenario to remix those outputs, which inhibits guessing using this consolidation heuristic: https://github.com/zkSNACKs/WalletWasabi/issues/10567
Thanks for the reply. I'm struggling a bit with the dilemma between coinjoins and small outputs and consolidation.
Small outputs aren't that bad, especially if you make small value payments. It's good to have a distribution of values of coins your wallet.
Again, the trick is to use Wasabi as a wallet, with frequent ingoing and outgoing small percentage values, and not to send one coin in and then withdraw all the value after.
If you want to move the money to a hardware wallet, you can make a payment inside a coinjoin to the hww address and a large amount, then the consolidation is in a coinjoin which hides common input ownership heuristic.
Thanks for the information.
I became aware of the importance of utxo management in the nodesignal episode because too small utxo become unspendable in a high fee environment. I'd best just give it a try.
I'm looking forward to the münzweg episode with you as a guest.